1. Field
The present invention generally relates to the field of integrated circuit package such as system-on-chip (SoC) and more particularly to a SoC architecture for voice and video over data network applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is a rapidly growing communication network of interconnected computers and computer networks around the world. Together, these millions of connected computers form a vast repository of multimedia information that is readily accessible by any of the connected computers from anywhere at any time. This growth and the easy access have significantly enhanced the opportunity to use advanced information technology for both the public and private sectors. It provides unprecedented opportunities for many technologies. End users may interact through their desktops, laptops, telephones, cell phones, hand held devices and videophones with one another. The internet has provided the means for accelerating the exchange of information as we progress through the information age.
In the telecommunication industry, the telephone calls are delivered through a circuit switching network traditionally. Nowadays, many telephone calls are delivered through the packet-switched network such as the Internet, which uses internet protocol (IP) networks to perform the traditional telecommunications connections. The packet-switched networks do not require any overhead to set up a connection. In addition, both audio and video, multimedia data, can be transmitted over the network as data stream made of packets encapsulated into frames. The applications of the telecommunication technologies on the Internet may include, but not be limited to, voice over IP (VoIP), video conference, videophone, IP television, and alike. However, there are a number of technical challenges for these multimedia data transmitted over the IP network. For example, multiple-channel real time voice/video traffic shares the same physical link (such as Ethernet) with normal high speed data traffic. The processing device at home or small business should possess both powerful real time media processing (e.g., voice/video compression and decompression) and packet processing (e.g., routing data packets) capabilities while it has to maintain a low cost level for consumer markets.
To overcome these technical challenges, a semiconductor chip capable of processing multimedia data encapsulated within network packets is placed in a video phone or the likes. Traditionally, such chip is a SoC using a digital signal processor (DSP) as the core. However, there are problems with the traditional design. For example, the software or firmware used in the DSP is written in assembly language, which is very cumbersome to develop (e.g., longer time to code, debug, etc.). A long erroneous and inefficient development cycle is resulted. Another problem is that DSP is not meant for control general computation, and DSP requires a large on-chip memory to store its code and data. Another issue in traditional architecture is that each functional block within the SoC accesses the memory via its own direct memory access (DMA) logics using a shared bus (e.g. AMBA). As a result, the logic usage is inefficient because dedicated DMA buffers and logics are required for each of the functional blocks. In addition, the conventional data bus is limited to an one-way data traffic, thereby the data throughout over the conventional data bus becomes a bottleneck of the traditional SoC.
Therefore, there is a need for a new improved architecture in a SoC designed for voice and video IP application to solve the aforementioned problems.